A collection of murder, mystery &suspense authors from Michigan. While we hope to bring you events off the Internet as well, we want to provide you insight to these wonderful novels that either take place in the greatest state or are by authors from this great state.
In the meantime, we hope to blog you to death.

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Writing about pain is hard, but there’s no shame in that struggle; it’s difficult to articulate even when we’re experiencing it.

This post featured in Joel Friedlander's​Self-Publishing: The Carnival of the Indies #85

​​‘Pain is […] the kind of subjective and poorly delineated experience that is difficult to express satisfactorily in language […] Indeed, pain shares some of the characteristics of target domains that have received considerable attention in the cognitive linguistic literature. Like LOVE, for example, it is private, subjective [...] cannot be directly observed,’ says linguist Elena Semino.

When researching this article, I was surprised by how little has been written about the art of depicting physical pain in fiction. And, yet, the act of hurting is prevalent in most genres; it deserves as much attention as emotional distress.

I've come across a few examples in my sentence-level editing work this year where great writers came a little unstuck, tending towards repetition and overwriting the pain. That was my prompt to delve deeper.

I thought it would be interesting to look at depictions of physical pain from within the bubble of novel craft ... and beyond, in medicine and poetry.​Here are 5 tips to help you write about physical suffering.